Description
The first thing that strikes you about this camera is the build quality. It
has a metal body and feels good and solid, and thanks to its roughened finish
and rubberised handgrip it is very easy to handle. It is slightly heavier than
some cameras, due in part to the 4 AA cells it runs on.

The next most noticable feature is the number of buttons and settings on the
mode dial. This is a bit of a give-away as to the sophistication of this
camera. Although you could live with the camera in full-auto mode, it would be
an absolute waste of its more professional features. These include both
aperture- and shutter-priority, full manual, a wide range of scene modes, auto-
bracketing, macro (20cm) and super-macro (3cm) modes.

Most features can be accessed without resorting to the menu system and
instead use a jog-wheel to cycle through a set of options. For example to
select macro mode, you press and hold the focus (AF/Macro/MF) button and use
the jog-wheel to select Macro from a set of possibilities. Whilst this takes a
little getting used to, it is far quicker than navigating six levels of menu as
you might on some other cameras.

The camera has both a TFT display and and LCD panel. The TFT screen is nice
and bright and is easy to read even in bright sunlight. It also tilts up
through 90 degrees, allowing the camera to be used at waist level, and down
through about 30 so you can take shots above your head. The LCD panel conveys
a lot of information about the current settings, from flash settings to F-
stops and shutter speed. This really helps to minimise the usage of the colour
display, and dramatically prolongs battery life. I have taken over 200
pictures on one set of batteries!

Picture quality is superb. There is a slight tendancy to under-expose,
particularly on whites, but this is preferable to over-exposure, which is much
harder to correct afterwards. You do need to be careful when photographing
highly saturated colours, like close-ups of flowers in strong daylight, as the
colour can get burnt-out, producing patches of saturated colour and losing any
detail. This seems to be particularly apparent with reds and magentas. Apart
from that the focussing is spot on and the detail is almost unbelievable,
particularly in super-macro mode.

Shutter-lag is not really a problem, but the focussing takes noticably
longer when using either macro or zoom. As with most auto-focus cameras, to
make sure you get what you expect simply depress the shutter half-way to get
the camera to focus and then press all the way to take the picture.

One unusual feature is the presence of not one, but two flash card slots.
The larger takes CompactFlash (both type I and II) and MicroDrives, the other
takes either SmartMedia or xD cards. The camera is supplied with one 32MB xD
card, which does not really hold that many pictures - if you are going to use
the highest quality setting you really need a 128MB card as pictures average
around 2.5 to 3MB a piece (interestingly the camera estimates them at about 4MB
so the shots remaining count is not a very good guide). The camera can take
two cards at once (one in each slot) and there is a button to switch between
the two.

Another interesting feature is panorama mode. Unlike some cameras, this
does not display part of the last frame for you to line up the next, instead
it just seems to mark the image as part of a panorama and the order in which
the pictures should be stitched together. Oddly for such a simple feature it
only works with Olympus brand flash cards.

The speed at which images are processed and written to flash is quite
impressive, even using ordinary CompactFlash (as opposed to Ultra fast). This
makes the camera much more usable, particularly for taking pictures of people.

There is very little to fault with this camera, but one really horrible
feature is the factory settings - the default is to reset everything when the
camera is turned off! This means that the picture quality reverts to the lower
setting and the selected card reverts to xD as well. This can be easily
corrected, but is very frustrating when you want to take high-res pictures onto
a CompactFlash card! Another strange features is the picture numbering, which
uses both folder and file numbering along with the date - this makes it quite
difficult to keep your snaps in the order you took them without replicating
this system on your hard disk.

One of the biggest oversights with the camera is the lack of a printed copy
of the reference manual. Instead you get a printed introduction to the camera
with the reference manual residing on the accompanying CD-ROM. Whilst this is
not a major obstacle, it does mean that you must first have access to a
computer and that you must take the time to print out the sections you are
likely to want to refer to.

Whilst almost everything is catered for on the camera, there are a couple of
optional extras which you may want to purchase. One is the Remote Control,
which lets you operate the zoom and shutter via a tiny infra-red unit (North
American users actually get this included). The other is the necessary adapter
ring to allow standard filters and rings to be attached to the lens barrel of
the camera. Whilst there are only a limited number of filters useful to
digital users, things like a polarising filter produce effects which it is not
possible to replicate in an image editor.

I am extremely happy with my C5050-Z and would recommend it to any serious
amateur who does not want to go the whole (and very expensive) hog to a digital
SLR. This camera has many features found on SLRs, and picture quality which is
on a par (apart from the really expensive cameras), the only difference is that
it has a viewfinder instead of looking through the lens.